The Eternal Return: Musings on the American Culture Wars

Recently I heard the rumour that Julian Zelizer, who used to teach history at the University at Albany until he moved to Albany's more prestigious political science programme and from there on to even more prestigious Princeton, and Kevin Kruse, another Princetonian, had published a book entitled Fault Lines: A History of America since 1974 with Norton. Hey, I was just struck by this thought: ain't cultural capital wonderful? I haven't read the book but I did listen to their discussion of it on The Majority Report With Sam Seder. Here are a few of thoughts on the subject of American fault lines or culture wars.

America was formed in the crucible of fault lines, fault lines, for example, between Protestants and Enlightenment philosophes and fault lines between Whites and Blacks. Slavery and race, of course, has been a fault line that has characterised the United States since the beginning and continues to divide America today as the country seems to be returning to the 1930s once again. We ended up fighting a war over slavery and race, a war, which in retrospect seems more like a battle than a war to end all wars. WWII, in this context, is an anomaly, an anomaly that manufactured a kind of consensus that lasted into the 1970s when Vietnam, Watergate, and the oil crisis rent the "consensus" asunder and revived the culture wars that characterised the US even before it was the US. We have to, by the way, in order to construct the post-New Deal and WWII American consensus of Schlesinger, Bell, and Herberg, ignore the dissonant fundamentalists, evangelicals, Birchers, and Southerners lurking beneath that perceived calm of the end of ideology era.